Re: Vowel variations in Arabic

Brian M. Scott wrote: 
On Tue, 31 Jan 2006 09:55:31 -0500, Harlan Messinger
<hmessinger.removethis@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:449c34F11r9uU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> in sci.lang:

[...]


I can tell now that even within one person's speech /a/ comes out two different ways depending on what precedes it--that after /q/, for instances, it's [a], while after /k/ it's closer to [A]? (Is [A] the symbol used for French "quatre" [kAtr]? 


No; [A] is low, back, unrounded, the vowel that dictionaries
assign to <pas>.  Dictionaries will tell you that <quatre>
has [a], though it seems to me that I've often heard a vowel
that's displaced a bit towards [æ] (low ASCII [&]), the
'cat' vowel.

I'm puzzled. Which is the symbol used in English for the "a" in usual US versions of "father" or "taco" or, where the sound is the same, "pot"?
.

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